The Plague of Doves - Louise Erdrich [37]
I pretended like I was doing something else and not listening, but she was not in the least fooled. I wanted desperately to ask about the doctor.
“Oh, good. Evelina. I need you to peel potatoes.”
“Can we put our hair up tonight, like Geraldine’s?”
Mama gave me a sharp look, and I glanced away. I pulled up the ring on the square kitchen trapdoor rimmed with pounded tin and set into the linoleum. I gingerly let myself down the ladder into the cellar. She handed me a colander.
“I’ll shut you down there if you mention Geraldine right now,” she said.
I scrambled back up with the potatoes. While I was down there, though, I heard her say something about the judge to Mooshum, so I guessed this had to do with why she was so upset with Geraldine, only I got it wrong, entirely. I thought that Geraldine (surprisingly, for her!) had done something outside the law and would have to go before the judge, in court, pay some fine or go to jail. That’s what I thought.
THE NEXT DAY, Uncle Whitey and Shamengwa came over to the house. Uncle Whitey was teaching me how to hold my own in life and I was punching at his hands.
“You’re quick,” he said, “but not quick enough.”
I tried to duck my head before he touched my ear, but never could.
“Think like a snake,” he said. “Don’t think, react.”
But he could tell that I was a thinker and would never have lightning reflexes. Nor would Joseph.
“Boy, you’re hopeless,” said Uncle Whitey. He was a big, square man with an Indian Elvis face and a springy pompadour that he slicked back with hair oil out of a bright purple bottle. Sometimes he lived with us, sleeping on the couch.
“What’s going on with Aunt Geraldine?” I asked him.
“I could get killed for saying,” said Whitey. “It’s classified.”
“Let’s get some gloves,” said Joseph, “you come out back behind the sheds and they can talk all they want about Aunt Geraldine. Gossip is beneath us as men.”
“I’m with you,” said Whitey, and showed that inside his shirt he had a pint of Four Roses.
That left me with Shamengwa and Mooshum, and after I sat drinking water with them for a while I asked, because I knew they would not get mad at me, what Geraldine had done to make my mother so angry.
“Done?” said Mooshum, trying for once to look as if he didn’t know. “She’s not done nothing.”
“Yet,” said Shamengwa, his face still.
Shamengwa had brought his fiddle over, but he was only plucking and tuning it, frowning. He complained about the poor quality of the strings.
I asked what happened to the men who had lynched our people.
“You talked of that!” Shamengwa hissed through his teeth.
With a wary look at his brother, Mooshum turned to me. “The Buckendorfs got rich, fat, and never died out,” he said. “They prospered and took over things. Half the county. But they never should of. And Wildstrand. Nobody hauled him up on a murder charge. Sheriff Fells turned into a cripple and old Lungsford, out of disgust, he went back to the civilized world he called Minnesota. He moved to Breckenridge, where in 1928 they went and hung the sheriff. He could not escape it. I think he died out east.”
“And you,” I said, “how did you live? Can you live after being hung?”
“They were never going to hang him to death,” said Shamengwa.
“Why not?”
But Mooshum began to argue with his brother, saying things that made no sense to me. I saw the same thing as Holy Track, the doves are still up there. Their annoyance with each other grew, so